(Adopted from my talk on 2
March 2009 at OsmaniaUniversity, Hyderabad, India)

Eradication of
Sorrow and Advaita:

At some stage or other,
every sensible man faces the fundamental questions like:

Who am I? What is
this world around? How did it come about?

Many ancient Indian
Advaitic texts start off the process of Self-inquiry with these
fundamental questions (e.g. Aparokshanubhuti, verse 12). It
is also usually presented in those texts that suffering and
pain are the primary causes for such an enquiry (e.g.
Bhagavad-Gita takes off with the scene of the psychological pain
and despondency of Arjun to whom Lord Krishna teaches
Self-knowledge. Gautam Buddhas Four-fold Path too
emphasizes the need to understand the existence and nuances of
sorrow).

A direct answer to the
fundamental questions raised at the beginning gets thus deflected
towards finding ways and means of redemption of
sorrow, pain, suffering or misery in the worldly life (e.g.
Vivekachudamani (Verses 36-40)).

The most common import of
all Upanishads is to point out the highest human goal to be the
realization of Oneness (Advaita) of self and
Brahman. Sankara (vide his Commentary on the 4th
Sutra, first pada of first adhyaya of Brahma Sutras (tattu
samanvayAt)) says that this realization becomes an accomplished
fact when there is a total Eradication of
Sorrow.

self:

A sense of
self is just an artifact. We acquired
self as a useful tool in evolution in order to help
us in the protection and preservation of the body organism.
If me vs. other separation is absent, this body will
not know whether it is feeding this mouth or the dog there when
this body is feeling hungry, needs energy input.

So the sense of
self gives us a separate identity.

The identity provides:

continuity in time,

a coherence to my
experiences,

ownership for my
possessions including my limbs and body and

doership for my
actions.

Our sense of
self emanates from our perceptions.

We all experience our
body to be part of ourselves. It is a fundamental aspect of
self awareness. How strong is your internal
image of your own self? This can be found out
by a small experiment (known as Rubber hand
illusion). Seat yourself in a chair. Place a
rubber hand in your front near to the real hand. Conceal
the real hand behind a cardboard screen. Ask your friend to
brush the real hand and the rubber hand at the same time.
In about 10  12 secs you feel the rubber hand is
yours. On the top of it your brain begins to disown your
own real hand. The temperature in the real hand drops down!

Such a perceptual
phenomenon does not happen just for a limb. It can happen
to your entire body. Swedish scientists proved two months
ago that healthy volunteers could indeed experience other
people's bodies as their own through manipulation of their
perceptions. A sort of parakaya pravesha you can
say!

Suppose you dont
get any sensory input at all. Then you cannot even think
you have a body. It happens to you all the time in your
deep sleep.

Dr. Goldberg of Israel
showed that we might lose our sense of self completely under some
conditions of threat for survival.

Lesions in brain may make
a patient deny part of his own body like a lady who described a
paralyzed hand lying beside her as not hers. This is known
as anasognosia. Some persons under certain pathological
conditions do not perceive their own bodies. So they claim
that they are dead because they do not have a body. This is
known as Cotards syndrome.

It is obvious from these
examples that your sense of self or I is
not a firm entity and gets altered easily.

There is no identifiable
entity we can call self or a spot for self in the
brain. There is no You in your head.
 self is a post facto construct after the
event, language dependent and is the result of confabulation by
the left temporal lobe. Our concept of
self is a fiction.

Perception 
Reality Disconnect:

What the brain creates in
our head is a map of what it perceives. It is not a replica
of what exactly is out there around. What we
can infer today from Neuroscience is that our detector apparatus
(comprising our senses and mind) is defective or inadequate to
know exactly what is there around. Our perceptory and
cognitive capabilities evolved mainly for the limited purpose of
protecting and preserving the body organism.

There is an obvious
disconnect between reality out there and the map in our
heads.

Advaita tells us that our
perception of the world around is an illusion and our sense of
self or I-consciousness is a fallacious non-entity
(aabhaasa). That is what exactly what Neuroscience too
tells us.

Mind:

Our thoughts constitute
our mind. It is not made up of any unintelligible
diaphanous, mindstuff. We could detect and
record thoughts as the electrical waves generated by our
brain. We are able to harness those energy waves to do work
for us. Paraplegics can move their wheel chairs just by
their thoughts. Mattel is bringing out even Toys this year
exploiting this principle.

Majority of
Neuroscientists do not think mind is a separate entity from
brain. Of course, there are a few of them talking about
substance dualism, but that is certainly a dwindling
minority.

Mind has been identified
as the principal reason for happiness or unhappiness in man.

Vedanta laid considerable
attention to one of our minds trait which may be called
Objectification. Mind cannot grasp or
understand any observation, any percept, made by the senses
unless it positions itself aloof as a distinct observer, as a
separate entity, from what is observed. This basic lacuna
of the mind gives an impression that mind has a separate and
individual existence of its own having I-consciousness as its
center. Vedanta tenaciously makes an effort to point out
this limitation and strives to transcend it.

Religion, however,
welcomed and took advantage of a related weakness of the mind
which is complementary to the quality of individuation i.e.
separation. While the tendency to objectify can
be called as Reification, the second quality can be
termed as Deification. Reification and
Deification can be viewed as the fallouts of the universal
survival mechanism of fight or flight that all living
creatures have acquired from the very beginning of evolution of
life on earth.

Let me explain this a
bit.

In the face of a threat
or danger, my mind has to assess whether I can fight it out or
should run away from the threatening situation. This
assessment does require the perceived thing to be assessed as a
distinct object separate from me in order to measure my own
ability in controlling the threat. If I am
unable to stand up to the threat, the obvious thing to do for me
is to take flight to save my skin. Suppose I have become so
weak-kneed or have developed cold-feet even to run, what is to be
done? The best thing then to do for my own safety is to
play possum. A more modern and cleverer way of doing it is
to surrender.

Man being so frail and
weak in facing the natural hazards or wild creatures, he began to
surrender to the natural forces by worshipping them,
by deifying them. So to reify or deify is the
mantra that our mind has learnt as the modified form of the
natural mechanism of fight or flight syndrome in the
game of survival.

After all, we are using
old machinery (i.e. our brain) which evolved for some other job
(survival) to a new use (abstract thinking) for which it is not
really designed. So man takes easily to religions
(particularly theistic ones) as religions excel in the art of
reification and deification.

Amelioration of
Affliction and Advaita

In order to be free of
sorrow, Vedanta advises us to deny the claim of ownership and
doership of our perceptions and actions. The world is not
bothered by an individual who successfully denies the ownership
and doership of the sensations; nor is such an individual
bothered by the world. (Yasmat na udvijate lokah
lokat na udvijate ca yah  BG XII
-15).

Chandogyopanishad tells
us that Happiness and sorrow do not touch one who has
become definitely unembodied (Ch.VIII. xii.1).

Since embodiedness is the
result of claiming ownership and doership of perceptions and
subsequent false construct of individuation, it is established
that the enlightened man has no embodiedness even while
living. The amelioration of pain and suffering is thus
brought about by ending inferred embodiedness, or the imaginary
sufferer. The actual sorrow of the physical body is not
alleviated by Advaita. All the greatest known Jivanmuktas
or let us say their bodies, did suffer ghastly diseases, they
aged and died.

John Wheeler in his 2007
book You Were Never Born was very categorical about
what sort of pain can be avoided by Advaita. While physical
pain and sorrow are admittedly unavoidable in the relative world,
'advaita' can free the individual from 'psychological
suffering'. Psychological suffering for him is
emotional turbulence, doubts, worries, fears, concern about
myself, what people think of me, the
feeling of being a separate individual etc. (p: 245). The
key is about one's shifting the focus from a memory-based
fictitious persona of autobiographical 'self' to that
very 'awareness' which 'awares' (for lack of a better word)
within oneself (see my Book Review at: